Star Trek: Enterprise: The Full Journey Blu-ray

Readers with particularly good memories might recall me being a little harsh about Star Trek: Enterprise as it creaked to a conclusion in 2005. Some time ago, I gave it another go, and watched some of it on rented DVDs, but as I recall, I didn’t get through the whole run. And not so long ago[1], I noticed that the complete series on Blu-ray had come down to the sort of price that made me think that maybe I really should give it another chance. And over the last however many weeks it took[2], I’ve now watched all four seasons and a load of extras. So, what does the older[3] Les think now?

OK, let’s get the first thing out of the way: that bloody awful song. Now I understand that the creators were trying to go for something a bit different, something to appeal to a wider audience, but if they had to have a song, surely they could have picked something better? The lack of “Star Trek” in the title was the idea of the creators rather than the studio, it seems.

It started out reasonably well, with a fair mix of good and not-so-good episodes, and sort of trundled along for a couple of years. There was some mysterious background with time-travelling twits from the future engaging in a temporal cold war, which had a lot of potential to be interesting, and could have gone further…

But in its third year, it got a whole lot better: the season had an overall story, which actually worked. There was a Deadly Threat to Humanity, alliances, betrayals, some rather interesting aliens and lots of Good Stuff.

But it all went a bit downhill with the fourth and final season. Stories dragged out over three episodes (a cost saving measure), and in stark contrast to the previous years, lots of continuity nods – how the Klingons lost their bumps[4], a young T’Pau and a bizarre final episode which had the Enterprise reproduced on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D apparently in the middle of a TNG episode, featuring Riker and Troi, who due to a transporter malfunction looked significantly older than they had in the rest of the episode they’re allegedly in. Not only sidelining the regular cast and not giving them a proper send-off, they even killed off one of them, in a pretty pointless manner.

So, yeah. Sort of good in parts, it was interesting to see it again, but I probably won’t return to it any time soon.

Extras in this set include lots of new and old bits, lots of talk from cast and creators, behind the scenes stuff, and an excruciatingly over-long chat between a bunch of the writers. Some of those chat things work really well, but this felt like eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation and not in a bad way. I lost interest long before its 90 minutes were up.

So, err, if you want to watch Enterprise, I’d suggest maybe looking for it on your choice of streaming service, and not worrying about missing the extras…

Ummm, this has been a bit long for a largely negative review. Sorry about that. But there will be a much more positive book review coming soon…

[1] Ah. Really? Apparently it was September last year
[2] I might have started before Christmas, I really can’t remember
[3] Though probably not wiser
[4] I preferred Worf’s “we do not talk about it to outsiders” line in the DS9 Tribbles episode[5]
[5] And I have a vague recollection of a Star Trek novel which suggested that in Kirk’s era, the Klingons we encountered were members of another species that was subject to the bumpy Klingons back home. Though that was blown when Klingons who’d been in the original series (without bumps) turned up in DS9 with bumps (maybe they grew them back when they got old).